Not the good kind, sadly. Things at Twitter continue to be a mess. I've deactivated my account for the time being; that almost definitely won't stick on a permanent basis this time around, but I'm testing the water.
Lots of people shopping around for their new platform of record. Lots of platforms jockeying to be the next contender. Maybe there'll be a clear winner, maybe not, but I expect a degree of fragmentation, which might be a good thing. I think it's naive to expect to just be able to pop up a new Twitter [the good bits], without either bringing the bad bits over as well or taking on new bad bits.
Part of the problem is sheer scale -- if you really want a 'global public square' (which I still think has been shown to be a pretty terrible idea), then it needs a massive content moderation effort. Which takes a massive amount of time and resources to effect. Which is one of the reasons it's tended to be bundled alongside commercial interests and advertising. But bundling the putative 'global public square' with commercial interests is even worse, etc.
Dan Hon:
So. Mastodon.social may be too big. We may reasonably expect it to collapse and splinter into smaller instances. Maybe that is okay. Maybe it doesn’t need to be that big, and that means maybe we are not yet ready for the global public city, because if we don’t have the tools to do this well-enough at scale in a way that isn’t funded by extractive advertising, then… maybe we shouldn’t do it and try to achieve it and we’ll fail until we’ve figured out different, better ways.
https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s13e23-colliders-speedrunning-benevolent/
As for Musk himself, well, he really is showing himself up, isn't he? Musk a) believes he is smarter than everyone else and b) holds a very simplistic (and additionally wrong) view of the world. Having all that money and power has kept him in so much of a bubble that this has never really been challenged.
So that means, when he looks at a problem in a sphere about which he knows nothing and comes up with a simplistic solution, he believes that the only reason that no one else has done that already is down to a failure of their intelligence. NOT, as is the truth, down to a failure of his intelligence and the fact that the domain he's gazing at is more complicated, and actually other people do understand it a lot better than him.
(I expect the number of times acting under this mistaken belief actually works out for you if you are a person of immense wealth and power is non-zero. If nothing else, many of the normal rules don't apply to you, and sometimes, ignorance of or the ability to ignore those rules can let you get away with solutions that on their own would not be viable. Which does not make this approach on the whole remotely smart or sensible. And, unfortunately, when you do get outliers where this works out, those people take as evidence of their brilliance (while ignoring all the incidents that would disconfirm it).)
And then you get crap like this going on.